star child

Via Kottke we discover that an architect, artist duo in Los Angeles have recreated an exacting replica of the iconic, other-worldly bedroom from Stanley Kubrick’s epic production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After disabling HAL, Doctor David Bowman confronts older and younger versions of himself in this setting when he goes to investigate a mysterious monolith in orbit around Jupiter. The bedroom film-set is in a massive warehouse transformed into an exhibition hall and thematically it is part of a series of displays meant to take visitors on a hero’s journey, an homage to Joseph Campbell’s trope of the monomyth.

despotting

What is even more remarkable than the dread phenomenon that is Dear Leader and his goon-squad and the spinelessness of fellow party members in the legislature is his media presence that’s beholden to no one and certainly not to the law of the land or to even factual events.
And while this behaviour and deportment will never be normalised no matter how it might be ground into our faces by jack-booted thugs or by more troublesome, subtler methods (like the nudges and cues that resulted in Dear Leader’s miscalculated triumph), it’s absolutely unbelievable how whatever the latest paroxysm is, it’s always on-message. However detached from reality or counter-factual it is, in the unmediated moment, it is Dear Leader’s account that lingers even if wholly refuted by other media sources—whom Dear Leader dismisses as “the enemy of the American people.”

br’er sessions’ splash mountain

Via Boing Boing, please take a moment to check out the wickedly wilting latest comic panel of Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling, wherein our intrepid hero takes a trip to the Hall of President at Dear Leader’s resort and theme park. Please keep arms and legs inside the ride vehicle at all times.

orbit allocation

The Medium features a thorough and important series of essays addressing the legal framework of accords governing the exploration, exploitation and use of Outer Space—especially timely as the markedly anti-academic, anti-aspirational regime of Dear Leader is not completely eviscerating America’s frivolous æronautics and space agency.
Though happy and relieved for NASA workers and future programmes for being spared (mostly), I worry what profit-motive might be driving the decision and what sort enslavement awaits mankind once we are jaunted off to asteroid mining operations—since the robots are not having any of it—and how antagonistic countries may grow more and more willing to contravene the treaties’ terms and weaponise space. International space law came about once it was discovered that the US had commission the seeding of the upper atmosphere with a halo, an artificial ring of microscopic needles to maintain radio contact with a globally deployed military in case the Soviets decided to snip the undersea cables that connected Washington to points beyond.

vee-dub

Car guy Jesse Bowers shares a gallery of impressions from the Bob Baker Volkswagen Customer Appreciation Show, that happens every spring in Carlsbad California and is a forum for collectors and dedicated caretakers of vintage VW buses. There are only the older models to be found in the States as an import duty has been levied against Transporters for years, customs classifying the van as a truck. Let’s hope we’re on the right side of any coming trade-war.

late stage prometheus

From the vantage of a quarter of a century, Æon magazine looks back at the publication of one of the more often cited, derided and misunderstood publication that addresses post-moderism—Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.

Of course little-h history rolls on but Fukuyama recognised, presciently some could argue, that History in terms of the way society coalesces politically is exhausted and though we might be concoct something more noble and utopian that liberal democracy, there were few to no other directions to go for society—except to collapse in feudalism and rigid class hierarchies. The philosopher took the longer view than what occupied the geo-political landscape at the time of his book’s release—the collapse of the Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which some naively took as a mandate to ratchet up freedom and free markets. What do you think? While Fukuyama’s prediction is just that and perhaps fails to factor in technological redundancies and natural conclusions (disruptions that might render economics meaningless), it does grasp the shallowness of celebrity culture that embraces nihilism and the triumph of tribalism. The Last Man is a borrowing from Friedrich Nietzche whose insistence on transparency was apparently not deity-friendly but for those at the leading edge of the end of civilisation’s evolution, there are no trappings to adequately fill the void and people will wallow in whatever mediocrity and material awards and recognition that remains.